State Rep. Chris Pringle wants to make sure fentanyl dealers are put in jail for a very long time if their drugs cause overdose deaths.

During the 2023 legislative session, Pringle’s bill was passed that would charge someone with manslaughter for selling fentanyl to people who die from overdoses. Unfortunately it didn’t become law because Gov. Kay Ivey mistakenly signed an earlier version of the bill.

Pringle (R-Mobile) pre-filed his bill again for the 2024 session.

“Drug dealers will actually increase the amount of fentanyl they put in their street drugs in order to ensure they kill addicts because their drug sales actually go up,” Pringle said Thursday on WVNN. “This is mind boggling to me, but addicts want the most powerful drug they can get their hands on and the drug dealers know it. So they want to make their drugs the most powerful on the street.”

The Alabama lawmaker expressed frustration about these drug traffickers not being adequately punished for their crimes.

“[I]t’s killing our children, it’s killing our family members, and we can’t hold these drug dealers accountable for it,” he argued. “We can only get them for trafficking, not for manslaughter.”

Pringle said this is an issue that has directly affected people close to him in Alabama and that a close family friend had lost his daughter due to a fentanyl-laced overdose just the night before.

He also said passing these tougher penalties is common sense and one of the only ways those on the state level can fight back against these dealers.

“We can’t control what the Biden administration is doing at the border,” he said. “We can’t control the fact that this drug is being shipped from China to Mexico and brought across our southern border. But we can say, ‘If you distribute that trash in this state and you kill people, we will put you in jail.’”

Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee